During an arc welding process, various forms of radiation are emitted including light in the visible, infrared, and ultraviolet spectrums. The emitted radiation may be of high intensity and can harm the eyes and/or skin of the user if the user is not properly protected. Traditionally, a user wears a conventional welding helmet having a window with one or more protective lenses to reduce the intensity of the radiation to safe levels. However, such protective lenses, while providing adequate protection for the user, reduce the amount of light through the lens and do not allow the user to see the visible characteristics of the arc welding process in an optimal manner. For example, certain visible characteristics of the arc and/or the molten metal puddle may be filtered out which the user would prefer to see, or smoke from the arc welding process may obscure the arc and/or the molten metal puddle during portions of the process. Furthermore, such protective lenses do not allow the user to see the thermal or infrared characteristics of the arc, the puddle, or the surrounding metal at all. Also, users that require corrective lenses are disadvantaged when using conventional helmet and are restricted to using a few “cheater” lenses that provide some magnification.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional, traditional, and proposed approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such approaches with embodiments of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.